Executive producers not on recording level

Any reason why executive producers do not belong to recordings? The relationship editor allows this, but I have seen editors argue against doing that.

My personal thoughts are that “executive producers” are people that have an oversight of the project (album) as a whole. They don’t necessarily have any involvement with the individual recordings, but they may make calls like “we need the cover art to convey this mood” or “use that 3rd take of the recording instead of the 4th one” or “those 2 songs don’t really fit with the theme of the album, let’s push those as bonus tracks instead of being part of the main album”.

Note: I don’t know if these are the kinds of calls executive producers make, but this is the kind of stuff I imagine they do—and it’s not really related to individual recordings as a whole, only the “complete product” that is the album. :slight_smile:

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I imagine they shout “Stop going over budget!” every couple of hours/minutes. :stuck_out_tongue:

They are mainly coordinating and overseeing the production process from the side of the record company, which could be anything really, but it mostly applies to the complete finished product, which is the release. I only ever see them credited for entire releases (but I’m sure there are exceptions), so it is probably best to add them to the release itself and not the individual recordings, unless they are specifically credited to the recordings on the release.

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I have seen them credited to specific recordings a few times, which is the only case I remember when I’ve entered this on recordings. It’s usually been on compilations though I think, so it’s honestly probably meant to give the original release’s exec producer some credit.

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I have an album that lists a label executive as “executive producer” and a group of musicians (of which the album artist is a part) as “album executive producers”. Would the right call be to put the “executive producer” on the album and the “album executive producers” on the recordings?

Why put “album executive producers” on the recordings? Album is Release, after all. :slight_smile:

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Here’s the credits I’m talking about: https://web.archive.org/web/20190616092720/https://s.yimg.com/ob/image/63e351d1-1b99-4e78-a10f-6921d5c0ef21.jpg

I would think “album executive producers” on that album is connected to the music and not only the business side of things (unlike the “executive producer” without the preceding word “album”). So these “album executive producers” are responsible for every recording on that album and not the overall release as a package.

I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion just from that text. Do you have additional knowledge about this?

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True. I’ll just leave it as release level.

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Hi, I wanted to bring up discussion / argument about adding executive producers to recordings on “The Golden Age of Polyphony” (https://musicbrainz.org/collection/7c120812-e065-4ea4-84cc-6df05e87415b), and ask you to reach a conclusion about the executive producer relationship on the recording level, both for this example and in general.

The argument left on my (automatically applied) edit was that the executive producer should only be listed on a per-release level, with similar arguments to what was written above. I heard this argument before, and I didn’t fully agree with this, I do understand the logic behind this, and would be willing to do this going forward. However, I also believe that this case could be a special case due to it being part of a compilation.

My argument for keeping this relation follows… In the album booklet (https://ia601505.us.archive.org/30/items/mbid-9ef669e4-92a3-4819-b44b-2e3f7fc7bf4c/mbid-9ef669e4-92a3-4819-b44b-2e3f7fc7bf4c-38253468643.pd) for the compilation “The Golden Age of Polyphony”, different tracks list different executive producers, presumably because the original releases don’t all share the same executive producers. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to add certain executive producers on the release level. So one could either put the executive producers on the recording level, or just don’t list the executive producers at all. I think that more information is better, so I opted for the first option. The consequence of this though is that for the original releases, it lists the executive producers both on the recording level and on the release level, which is not ideal.

I think it is worth having among you a discussion about this and reach some sort of consensus about this. If this case warrants having an executive producer on the recording level, then what separates this case from just you average release. This should then be clearly defined. If this case doesn’t warrant adding the executive producer at the recording level, then when does it? If there are no such cases, then maybe the executive producer role should get deprecated on the recording level?

Regardless, being essentially demanded to revert already applied edits (on both this and for adding streaming services to physical releases), especially for something where there is no style-guide for, and refusing to take my arguments seriously, is quite rude. Please remember that I am volunteering my time too, and I am trying the better the data, not plagiarize. If you feel that strongly, you can kindly leave a note to not do that again (preferably with a link to a style-guide) and revert the edits yourself. If adding the executive producer to a recording relation (and streaming services on physical medium) is that forbidden, then it should be forbidden on the ui level. Unfortunately, I won’t be volunteering my time further with this project.

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If anyone is wondering, this seems to be the edit the above post is about: Edit #109662476 - MusicBrainz

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